Analysis of Bails Posted in Circuit Courts
Pursuant to HRS § 804-7, the Judiciary has been asked to establish a statewide program that permits the posting of monetary bail seven days a week for defendants for whom a monetary amount of bail has been set. The purpose of this program is to address the limited hours currently available for posting bail for individuals held in the custody of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR).
No data exists on how many individuals might benefit from being able to post bail on weekends or holidays. In non-felony cases, bail is typically set upon arrest by law enforcement, and arrestees may post bail at any time while in police custody. In contrast, bail amounts in felony cases must be set by a Circuit Court judge. For this reason, this report focuses exclusively on felony cases filed during calendar years 2023, 2024, and 2025. Note that the data used in this analysis is current through November 17, 2025.
Because bail information is not consistently entered in the designated fields within the Judiciary Information Management System (JIMS), the research team utilized the capability of large language models (LLMs) to extract bail details from the information contained in the Bail tab including notes. This approach has limitations, as not all bail-related data are recorded in that tab. The research team used the Google Gemini model for data extraction. It should be noted that the most accurate bail information would require extracting data from multiple bail and docket fields as well as docket filings. The research team intentionally avoided this approach to reduce the costs associated with AI-based data extraction and to minimize the potential risk of exposing personally identifiable information (PII) through AI models.
To assess the accuracy of the AI-extracted results, the team manually reviewed \(200\) cases with bail entries. Gemini produced correct resutls on \(99.5\%\) of cases where the relevant data was present in the JIMS Bail tab. However, approximately \(9\%\) of cases contained incomplete or missing bail data in the JIMS Bail tab. For example, a bench warrant may be issued and served, but the Bail tab may not record the date the warrant was served, preventing the calculation of the precise date the defendant was taken into custody. In another example, the electronically generated filing date may not match the correct date documented in the docket file for the bail-posting event. These issues, which affect roughly \(9\%\) of cases, reflect limitations in the underlying data rather than inaccuracies in the Gemini model.
During the study period, a total of \(4,240\) bail postings were recorded. The following plot shows the distribution across the different circuit courts by year. Note that the decline in 2025 is partly due to the fact that the dataset does not include the full year.
The following figure shows the length of time it took for defendants to post bail. For clarity, we categorized cases into four groups:
- Bails posted within 1 day
- Bails posted within 2-7 days
- Bails posted within 8-30 days
- Bails posted after a month
The next plot shows the distribution of bail amount across the different circuit courts. The average bail amount posted for each circuit court is as follows:
- First circuit court: \(\$23,593\)
- Second circuit court: \(\$22,225\)
- Third circuit court: \(\$16,256\)
- Fifth circuit court: \(\$11,739\)
Bail amounts in the first and second circuit courts are higher compared to those in the third and fifth circuit courts. This difference may be related to variations in the severity of charges across circuits, which was not accounted for in this analysis.
Although it is difficult to determine how many people would benefit from a system allowing bail to be posted seven days a week, it is likely that those who currently post bail on the first day after weekends or holidays would benefit the most. This is because these individuals might otherwise have been able to post bail during weekends or holidays if the system were available. The following figure shows the number of bails posted on the first day of the week or immediately after holidays in each circuit, excluding cases where bail was posted on the same day it was set.